Hi Rick, It's being a long time since my last article at linuxdevices, receive my greetings from Chile! With regard to the new article: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS4370323584.html It caught me by surprise. There was a thread in dillo-dev and some users suggested that campaign. I was commenting on gross factual mistakes in the wiki when it was announced that an article was live at linuxdevices. It's good to see our users' interest in keeping the project alive, so I'll comment the article here so you can correct and improve the article:
A project to create an ultra-lightweight web browser for use in embedded devices and other resource-constrained hardware has issued a plea for financial help. The Dillo Project says it needs to find a corporate sponsor in order to add anti-aliased text, CSS, Javascript, and internationalization/localization support.
We've almost finished the port to FLTK2, and it already has anti-aliased text. (Dillo doesn't compile with FLTK1) FLTK2 uses UTF8 and provides antialiasing so it solves the problem of using GTK1 (this was one of the reasons for GTK1 to go GTK2). UTF8 also makes it easy to add i18n and l10n without breaking things inside the browser. I point this technical details because unofficial patches have been developed for antialiasing, i18n and l10n for GTK1. This is a good workaround but not a long term solution.
(Click for larger screenshot of Dillo)
Here you'll find a screenshot of dillo-fltk2: http://www.dillo.org/test/ph2.png (it shows antialiasing)
Dillo is a very lightweight (about 350 KB) browser supporting a subset of HTML, CGI, SSL, and cookies.
And plugins. + Images (GIF, PNG and JPEG)
Dillo is not really practical for browsing the modern Internet, due to missing support for frames, CSS, Javascript, and other commonly used standards and protocols. It also lacks support for anti-aliased text, something even Linux desktop users have long taken for granted, and appears to have only rudimentary HTML error handling capabilities.
The HTML error handling has improved a lot (the bug meter can atest that), but yes, error handling is not as advanced as with Firefox. Anyway, sometimes there're pages with a few hundred mistakes handled gracefully. ;-)
Nonetheless, Dillo is extremely fast and lightweight, using less memory in some cases than popular text-based browsers such as lynx. And, since it supports CGI, it could be useful as a framework for simple device interfaces based on Web standards, such as survey kiosks and other closed, "walled garden" applications.
BTW, the new Dillo with a statically linked FLTK2 is about 820 Kilobytes.
Additionally, Dillo is popular with web developers due to excellent HTML error reporting.
:-)
Dillo is expected to gain support for anti-aliased text after its development team completes a port to FLTK (fast light toolkit, aka "fulltick").
[Already there, see above]
However, founder Jorge Arellano Cid appears adamant that funding be located prior to release of his nearly-complete FLTK port, according to a "save Dillo" campaign page hosted here.
True. The situation is this: there're two core developers. We need at least to be both working on Dillo full time (ideally three devs.) otherwise the project would lag behind the moving target that Internet browsing is. Sebastian (the other core developer) is employed fulltime in Germany so he has almost no time to Develop. I don't have funds to keep on working fulltime too, so if there're no funds the project will loose the main developers and their knowledge. With regard to releasing. That's what I've done for 6+ years with GTK1 and no funding happened ;-). If there were more interested developers in working with Dillo (lets say 6 serious and qualified people) I would consider releasing because the project could advance in that case. Believe it or not I asked in dillo-dev, and there was only one answer from a dev that could put 4 hours/week and that had no FLTK2 knowledge nor on Dillo internals. Given the current situation, the best option seems to remain closed until funding happens.
Other ongoing Dillo development efforts reportedly include CSS support (said to be "70 percent complete") and JavaScript support, as well as additional internationalization (I18n) and localization (l10n) features.
I reported 70% on CSS. This is on the FLTK2 branch, not from external efforts. The interesting part is that we paved the way for all these in the newest branch, so now it's much easier to develop them over the new code base than with the old branch. A rough timeline estimation would be near 2 years to have the whole set: antialiasing, CSS, I18n, l10n, Frames, Tabs, SSL and good Javascript. We could make a release in 6 months and thenceforth go on incrementally adding features in any desired order (probably this would be up to the sponsors' needs).
Additional details about Dillo can be found on Dillo's official funding presentations page. For additional background, be sure to read Cid's 2002 introduction to the browser, here.
The Dillo project previously sought funding in February of 2004, and was successful in obtaining a one-time grant through the Linux Fund.
Thanks a lot for your time and commitment. -- Cheers Jorge.-